Athlon II X4 630 & 620: Affordable Quad Cores

Our test systems consist of 2x2GB of DDR3 memory, a GeForce 9400GT graphics
card, WD VelociRaptor hard drive and an OEM Seasonic power supply. Unfortunately
we did not have a Q8200 at our disposal so instead we a Q8200S (the 45W
version of the Q8200) and a Q6600, an older 95W 65 nm processor using a slower
1066 MHz front bus, but with a higher 2.4 GHz clock speed and twice as much
L2 cache. It is safe to assume an actual Q8200 will fall somewhere in-between
these two processors in terms of power consumption. The ambient temperature
was 22°C.

Test Results: General System Power Consumption (AC)

Processor

Idle

VC-1
Playback

CPU Load
(half cores)

CPU
(all cores)

C2Q Q8200S

64W

75W

99W

115W

X4 620 (UV)*

66W

86W

99W

124W

X2 550 BE

65W

85W

N/A

129W

C2Q Q6600

69W

83W

120W

139W

X4 630 (UV)*

71W

89W

111W

139W

X4 620

66W

87W

117W

153W

X4 630

71W

89W

122W

157W

X3 720 BE

76W

97W

N/A

153W

X4 810

79W

99W

127W

159W

*X4 630 undervolted by 0.125V, X4 620 by 0.2375V.

Overall the X4 630 consistently used about 5W more than the lower clocked X4
620, not enough to be considered significant. Both proved to be more power efficient
than their Phenom II cousins, the X3 720 and X4 810, but only when idle or with
a light load like VC-1 video playback. It seems L3 cache creates a noticeable
energy demand. System power consumption between the two Athlon II X4's and the
95W Q6600 were also similar except at full load where the Q6600 used 15~20W
less.

Undervolting reduced the X4 630's full load consumption by 18W, while the X4
620 saved 29W. This was no surprise as we were able to undervolt the 620 by
almost twice the amount as the 630. When undervolted, our X4 620 sample probably
uses about the same amount of energy as a Q8200.

Performance

Test Results: Benchmarks

Processor

NOD32

WinRAR

iTunes

TMPGEnc

PCMark05

C2Q Q8200S

2:59

3:43

4:20

3:56

7648

C2Q Q6600

2:56

3:41

4:35

3:59

7740

X2 550 BE

2:34

3:09

4:44

4:54

7217

X4 810

3:05

3:32

5:38

3:29

7756

X4 630

3:10

3:58

5:21

3:19

8203

X3 720 BE

2:47

3:16

5:13

5:08

7738

X4 620

3:23

4:05

5:44

3:32

7660

Our brief benchmark suite favored the Q8200S over the X4 620/630. The Q8200S
held a large lead over the two Athlons in our iTunes encoding test, and posted
smaller wins in our anti-virus and file archiving tests. The X4 620 and 630
beat Intel's offerings in video encoding with TMPGEnc  the type of task
where quad cores typically shine. Overall we'd say the Athlon II X4's need another
200~300 MHz to truly compete with the Q8200 in our test suite, but if you typically
use more thread-aware applications, the balance will tip in the other direction.

The 2.8 GHz Athlon II X4 630 performed similarly to the 2.6 GHz Phenom X4 810
 an extra 200 MHz in clock speed seems to make up for the 630's lack of
L3 cache. It should be noted however that the X4 800 series has 4MB of L3 cache
while the 900 series sports 6MB.